Page 5 of Orc's Little Human
My boots thunder against the wooden floor as I pace the main room, trying to make sense of the chaos in my head. Twenty years of leadership. Twenty years of putting clan survival above everything else—above comfort, above mercy, above the luxury of conscience.
And I throw it all away for what? A pair of defiant eyes and spine that refuses to bend?
Strength. Blood. Kin. Earth.
The four pillars of the Vraem Code echo through my mind like a chant, like the rhythm of my parents' dying breaths. Everything I've built, everything I've sacrificed, rests on those foundations. They've guided every choice, every battle, every necessary cruelty that's kept my people alive in a world that wants us dead.
But which pillar does this serve? Claiming a human captive doesn't make us stronger—it makes us a target for other clans who'll see weakness where they should see strength. It doesn't honor blood—human blood means nothing to the ancestors watching from their stone beads. It doesn't protect kin—if anything, it puts Thalira and the others at risk.
And what does the sacred stone care for human lives?
I stop pacing and grip the edge of my table hard enough to leave dents in the wood. The grain bites into my palms, grounding me in something solid while my thoughts spiral into chaos.
So why?
The question hammers through my skull with the persistence of waves against stone. Why risk everything for a stranger? Why let instinct override decades of hard-won wisdom?
The answer hovers at the edge of consciousness, maddeningly close but impossibly distant. Something about the way she held herself in the circle. Something about that moment when she looked at Varok like she was measuring him for a grave instead of begging for her life.
Something familiar.
A scratch at the door interrupts my brooding, followed by Thalira's voice calling my name. I cross the room in three strides and yank the door open to find my sister standing on the threshold with her arms crossed and that expression that means I'm about to get lectured.
By a nine year old no less.
"What in the ancestor's names are you thinking?"
3
SELENE
The silence in this cramped room presses against my eardrums like water at the bottom of a well. Every creak of the longhouse settling, every distant murmur of orc voices, sets my nerves jangling like broken glass. I sit on the edge of the rough sleeping pallet, hands clasped tight enough to leave nail marks in my palms, and wait for whatever fresh hell this chieftain has planned.
The room itself tells a story I don't want to read. Weapons hang from iron pegs driven into the wooden walls—curved blades that gleam with recent sharpening, a war hammer whose head bears suspicious dark stains, throwing axes arranged with the precision of someone who knows exactly how much force it takes to split a skull. Furs drape every surface, some still bearing claw marks from whatever beast died screaming to provide them. The air tastes of smoke, old blood, and something else—something metallic that makes my teeth ache.
This is where he brings his victims.
The thought crawls through my mind like a parasite, feeding on every shadow that dances in the flickering light seeping under the door. I've heard the stories whispered around campfires,seen the evidence carved into survivors who escaped orc raids. They don't just kill—they make art of suffering, stretch death into something that lasts for days.
And this one, this Korrath with his molten gold eyes and scarred tusks, he's their leader. Whatever twisted appetites the others indulge, his will be worse. More creative. The kind of cruelty that comes from intelligence married to absolute power.
My fingers trace the Mark of Neptheris hidden beneath my torn shirt, the raised flesh still tender even after all these months. If he discovers it, if he realizes what I am... The death camps will seem like mercy compared to what orcs do with magic-touched humans. I've seen the empty sockets where they carved out eyes that saw too much, the stumps where they took hands that channeled power they couldn't control.
Minutes crawl by like wounded animals. My stomach clenches with hunger I've learned to ignore, but the exhaustion is harder to push aside. When did I last sleep? Really sleep, not the half-conscious fugue state that passes for rest when every sound might signal discovery? Three days ago? Four?
The bar across the door shifts with a grinding scrape of wood against wood. I'm on my feet before conscious thought catches up, every muscle coiled to fight or flee despite knowing both options lead to the same bloody end. The door swings open with deliberate slowness, designed to maximize fear, and I brace myself for the sight of Korrath's hulking frame.
Instead, a child slips through the gap.
She can't be more than nine or ten, all wild black hair and curious amber eyes that seem too large for her moss-green face. Ivory tusks just beginning to push through her gums catch the light as she grins at me with the kind of fearless enthusiasm that makes my chest tighten with old grief. She carries a wooden bowl in hands still soft with youth, and her bare feet make no sound against the stone floor.
A trick. Has to be a trick.
Orcs don't have children—that's what everyone knows, what the stories all agree on. They spring from the earth fully formed and bloodthirsty, born with weapons in their fists and violence in their hearts. This... this is something else. Some sick game designed to lower my guard before the real horror begins.
But she moves with genuine childish awkwardness, bumping her hip against the doorframe and nearly dropping the bowl in her eagerness. Her eyes hold no malice, no calculated cruelty—just bright curiosity and something that might be sympathy.
They're using a child. These bastards are actually using a child.
